Cirrus@Austlit

'This article re-examines the nationalist poetry published by canonical Australian poets A. B. “Banjo” Paterson and Henry Lawson in the influential journal the Bulletin from 1889 to 1900 as a delayed, settler-colonial instance of Romantic ballad revival. Bush ballads were centrally involved in both the poetic and media dynamics characteristic of earlier Romantic movements. Romanticism therefore provides a new framework to assess one myth of Australian settler-cultural nationalism (naturalized by certain groups within Australian literary studies) that Paterson and Lawson are representative of an organic and distinctly white Australian poetic tradition. This article argues that nationalist ballads used Romantic modes to fabricate a deep white historicity in the bush, establishing a folkloric tradition in a situation with neither an evident folk nor indeed any artifactual lore.' (Publication abstract)

'For all the obvious reasons I have been reflecting lately on what Walter Benjamin’s observes in his essay ‘The Storyteller’ ; “Boredom is the dream bird that hatches the egg of experience… [however] his nesting places — the activities that are intimately associated with boredom are already extinct in the city”. If Benjamin draws a causal link between the destruction of experience and the genesis of modern information; the decline of “storytelling” and the rise of “news”, it is hard to imagine what his judgement would be of our relationship to the web today. The internet is, of course, a fundamentally nauseating and overwhelming ex-American military technology of mass surveillance. However, it is simultaneously (and undeniably) the nexus of new “experiences” and modes of living. The internet is an experience, indeed, strictly in Benjamin’s sense. If anything has brought the activities that are associated with boredom back to the city, it is the internet – the inventor of the “infinite scroll” sincerely regrets the consequences of his actions. So, what’s the pay-off regarding experience?' (Introduction)